How does the theme of the other--as person, experience or alternative conceptual scheme-allow us to reassess the role of the self in literary texts? This book employs phenomenology and semiotics to argue that modern literature is strongly concerned with the role of time in the construction of the self. Alterity and Criticism: Retracing Time in Modern Literature argues that the role of time in canonical literature underlies the experience of alterity and requires a new hermeneutic to clarify how the self emerges in literary texts. Romantic poetry from Goethe to Shelley and the modern prose tradition from Flaubert to Butor constitute different traditions but also indicate, on a textual basis, how alterity performs a crucial role in reading, thus encouraging us to interpret literary texts in terms of the related concerns of self, other and time. The author examines the phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas and Wolfgang Iser, as well as the cultural semiotics of Julia Kristeva, to argue that modern literature provides the occasion for a new understanding of the self in time and, in this way, addresses some of the pressing literary problems of our own period.

About the Author
William D. Melaney is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the American University in Cairo. He is the author of After Ontology: Literary Theory and Modernist Poetics and Material Difference: Modernism and the Allegories of Discourse.


Book Information
ISBN 9781786601506
Author William D. Melaney
Format Paperback
Page Count 238
Imprint Rowman & Littlefield International
Publisher Rowman & Littlefield International
Weight(grams) 367g
Dimensions(mm) 220mm * 153mm * 18mm